Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

“You say thanks for the compliment and then you compliment me. It’s basic civility,” she said.

“Ok. But I don’t want you to think that I’m saying this because you asked me to give you a compliment, I’m saying this because it’s perfectly true. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in my life. I’m not good at saying things, but you don’t just look beautiful, you have that rare thing that gets said too much, and I’m sort of regretting saying it right now, but the thing called inner beauty, too. You have it. It’s a purity of spirit, I can just tell that you are both lovely and good. Since I saw you first, I’ve felt bewitched, it’s like that stanza from Yeats, ‘It had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair, who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone and kiss her lips and take her hands…. And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’”

“That’s incredible,” she gasped, genuinely touched.

I knew half a dozen Yeats poems, all memorized to impress a different girl in a different world. But it had done the trick and I knew I had to deflate the moment, so I finished off the whisky, gave her my best winning smile, and said:

“Yeah, Amber, maybe I’m cynical, but it’s true that when you’ve got an Irish accent and you’re trying to impress a woman and as long as she’s not Irish or a hard-bitten professor of literature then Yeats will generally do the trick. ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ is by far the most popular choice, but I like ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus,’ it’s got that great last line, the chicks love it.”

She looked at me for a second, fury on her face, and then I saw that it was mock fury and then she started to laugh and laugh. Laugh so much tears were running down her face. Relief? A huge pent-up flood of emotions suddenly let loose? I was going to ask if she was ok, but before I could, she was standing up and she was reaching out her hand to mine, and I gave her my hand and she pulled me to my feet and kissed me. Hard, passionate, angry kisses. Her mouth was hungry with desire. She was drowning, she was suffocating, she was dying, she was living again through me.

I carried her to the bedroom and laid her on the bed. I pulled her dress down on one shoulder and kissed her arm and the top of her breast. There was a scar on the shoulder, a tiny imperfection in all that beauty. It made her more desirable, not less.

She wriggled out of the dress and undid her bra and ripped off my jacket and shirt. And still having my wits about me, I dimmed the lights, to hide the track marks. She looked up from the bed.

“I need you, Alexander, I need you, now, tonight,” she moaned.

I didn’t say anything. I took off my trousers and her panties. Her body pale, slender, carved in white marble, her hair like the faery gold; her red mouth open, so hungry, there was never anyone so hungry.

I kissed her neck and between her breasts and she pulled me close, her nails in my back holding on to me as if we were in danger of being torn apart. Sucked away into a vortex by terrible forces, the malignancy of Charles, by the blackness pursuing me. We were alone in this land of light. Secure. As long as we stayed together it would be good. Outside there were horrors, waiting like traps. But not here, not here. Here we were safe, safe, in this bed, in this one night.

“We’re shipwrecked,” she said, and I, agreeing, added nothing.

The bed and the silk sheets and her smooth skin and those eyes, blue like that ocean in Donegal. And her hands in my hair and on my back. And her voice in those soft harmonized American vocals.

“Oh, Alexander, you don’t know, you have no idea.”

“I want to know,” I said.

“No, no,” she said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“No.”

“Tell me,” I insisted.

“Kiss me,” she demanded.

My hands stroked her long beautiful legs and her belly and her arms. And I held her close and I kissed her and she tasted of champagne and whisky and ice.

And I kissed her and she didn’t speak and I came inside her and her body ached, hurting with pleasure and loss and she sobbed and we lay there in the dark, panting, breathing, holding each other.

And then she climbed on top of me and we made love again, and the midnight hour came and went.

“Hold me,” she said.

And I took her in my arms and I kissed her, and she smelled of booze and that perfume and her own sweat and the smell of me. She fell asleep. A drunk sleep. Exhausted.

This girl, this woman, here with me in the long, dark, lovely night. Beautiful. And I looked at her. This girl, whose husband was a hundred and fifty miles away in Aspen. This girl, whose husband maybe killed Maggie Prestwick or aided Maggie’s killer on a May morning twenty-two years ago. This man who almost certainly did kill his blackmailer and then committed another brutal slaying on the girl who found out about his slush fund. And it was neat now, tidy. Of course, we had helped, John and myself, killing the only person who could prove anything. We had wiped the traces. And now he could do anything. He could even run for Congress. And win. There would always be rumors, there would always be stories, but nothing that could be proven, nothing that would stick, and with his good works established, and his politics sensible, he would rise. And she would rise with him. From this foundation of blood and lies. Both of them bound by the black rite of this marriage. It would take place, it would happen. Unless I said something, unless I did something, unless I broke her away and let her know the truth about her husband, the truth about Victoria Patawasti. About Victoria, about Amber’s shadow, her mirror, her sister, the ghost that brought us together. Yes, and Maggie, too.

How much did Amber know? How much did she want to know? Is that why I’d slept with her? To find out the truth.

And she lay there snoring, and I knew what I was going to do.

A crime.

It could kill her.

It could fucking kill her.

I eased myself out of the bed. I went to the kitchen and got an ice cube.

I found my jacket. I took out the needle, the spoon, I got some water, my alcohol swab. I boiled the heroin, drew it up through the cotton wool. It would be her foot, she’d never notice and I’m the master, I always find a vein, every time.

But ketch and alcohol do not mix. Just ask any of a dozen dead rock stars. It can stop the heart. Can I take her across the line? What if she’s done nothing? Can I do that to her? Can I take her across and still have the right to save her, protect her?

I found a vein, put the ice cube on it, to numb it. She didn’t wake. I took off the ice cube, swabbed the spot with alcohol, injected the heroin above her heel.

She moaned for a second in her sleep.

I let her absorb it, I watched her chest move up and down.

Her breath became shallow, she began to sweat. Was her heart going to fib? I sat there, frightened for ten minutes, but then she came out of it. She was in the center of the high. There were things I had to know and this might be the way.

I woke her.

“Amber,” I whispered. “Amber.”

She looked at me, smiled.

“Amber, I want to ask you something.”

“Ask me anything,” she said drowsily, happily.

“I want to ask you about Charles.”

“Ask me anything,” she moaned.

Heroin isn’t a truth serum and the memory doesn’t blank afterward, so you have to be reasonably subtle, not shock them enough so they’ll remember.

“If Charles wanted to get into someone’s computer, could he do it?”